Important Patterns

One of the most important and useful sources of inspiration for designing this house came from the work of Christopher Alexander. Alexander and is associates wrote some interesting books in the 1970 that, while dated in language and in some ideas, are based on timeless notions of form-follows-function. He studied what worked and what didn't over long periods of time, asked deep questions about why these things worked, what problems they were solving, and how they made people feel. Out of this he developed a preliminary set of patterns which address design issues from the regional level on down to the construction if individual dwellings.

I found his work helpful because it gave me a language to use when talking and thinking about our design. While Alexander himself doesn't consider the list of patterns in A Pattern Language to be complete or even right, taking it all with a grain of salt and your own common sense one can still find this very useful. What follows is a list of the patterns we tried to incorporate in our design. The numbers are those Alexander uses to identify the patterns in his book.